The Museum at Purgatory: 01/04/07

People define themselves by the things they collect in life and in the afterlife: that is the idea behind The Museum at Purgatory by Nick Bantock. Those who know themselves and are comfortable with what they've become can move on to one o the utopian or dystopian worlds. Those who can't come to terms with themselves (for good or bad) or those who don't know themselves must stay in Purgatory, the holding pen for the afterlife.

The narrator of The Museum at Purgatory is Non, curator of the museum. He came to the afterlife with amnesia, a rare but not unheard of condition. As he can't know himself, he is stuck in Purgatory. The hope is that he can jog his memory by cataloguing the items others have brought with themselves to the afterlife.

Any good museum book must have examples of its collections and Nick Bantock provides the illustrations but as drawings (as he does for the Griffin and Sabine books) and as photographs of what I assume are sculptures he produced for the book. The artwork isn't as big a player in the story as it is in the Griffin and Sabine books and the book suffers a bit for it. He's a better artist than he is a writer.

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